Wingsuit pilots skim low over a snowy slope as skiers and snowboarders carve the powder beneath them in this sequence from IMAGINE: Life Spent on the Edge, the 2013 action-sports film from France's Nuit de la Glisse. The pilots named in the film are Mathias Wyss and Ludovic Woerth, and the shot puts two of the most spectacular ways of descending a mountain into a single frame.
IMAGINE and the Nuit de la Glisse films
Nuit de la Glisse is the cinema label of French filmmaker Thierry Donard, who has been filming extreme sports since the 1980s. In 1987 he made a set of short films under the name, and from 1992's Pushing the Limits onwards the label released a long run of feature-length action-sports films for cinema: Freeman, Elevation, Heroes of Freeride, Testimony and many more.
IMAGINE: Life Spent on the Edge came out in 2013, followed by Addicted to Life in 2014 and the Don't Crack Under Pressure series from 2015. Like the rest of the series, it brings together several action sports, here freeride skiing, snowboarding and wingsuit flying, and was shown in cinemas in several countries.
How a wingsuit flies
A wingsuit has fabric wings stretched between the arms and the body and between the legs. Air entering inlets inflates cells in the fabric, so the suit forms an aerofoil around the pilot. The extra surface cuts the rate of descent and turns falling into a fast, forward glide, steered by changing body position and the tension of the wings.
The modern sport grew out of Frenchman Patrick de Gayardon's self-inflating suit of the early 1990s. In 1999 Robert Pečnik and Jari Kuosma began producing BirdMan suits, which opened the sport to many more skydivers and BASE jumpers. The FAI recognised wingsuit performance and acrobatic competition in 2015, and the first World Wingsuit Performance Flying Championships followed in 2016.
Proximity flying above the slope
Better-gliding ram-air suits made proximity flying possible: following terrain at close range, which is exactly what this sequence shows. Every wingsuit flight ends under a parachute; the pilot returns to a stable position, deploys, frees the arm wings enough to steer, and lands under canopy.
Proximity flying is for highly experienced pilots only. Most fatal wingsuit accidents involve hitting terrain or an object, often after a misjudged flight path, which is why sequences like this one are carefully planned with the skiers and the camera crew.
Watch the wingsuit and ski sequence
Video: IMAGINE: first ever wingsuit flying above skiers (published by Nuit de la Glisse).
Explore more: Valentin Delluc’s speed-riding film; a GoPro journey into the Andes.
Related reading
- Let Me Take You to the Mountain: GoPro’s Andes Adventure
- Zoe’s First Skiing Days: A Family Film at Seventeen Months
- Mount Baker Road Gap: A Backflip Attempt and Its Landing
- Dub Roots: Dubsatch Collective’s Alta Ski Film
No comments